Last night, I made the recipe for 'pistachio and cherry mexican wedding cakes' that was in the December issue of Bon Appetit. The original recipe is right here - it's enough to make 80 (!) cookies, so I quartered the recipe so that we would only come out with 20.
I changed the recipe only very slightly - just to add a little more of the pistachios, which Av and I both really like, and - rather than dried cherries - I used craisins (dried cranberries). I think I would like these with the pistachios only, even.
Here's how I made them - this is 25% of the original, with my tiny changes:
Ingredients:
1 stick unsalted butter (1/4 c.) at room temperature
1/4 cup powdered sugar (plus more to roll the cookies in for later)
1/4 tbsp. vanilla extract
dash salt
1/3 c. shelled pistachios (the recipe says to chop these, but I didn't because I knew they would get broken up a little when added to the mix in my KitchenAid - even the ones that didn't get broken were just fine - they aren't too big)
1/4 c. craisins
.825 of a cup of cake flour (I just estimated what that would look like in my measuring cup)
.415 of a cup of regular, all-purpose flour (again, I just estimated what that would look like in my measuring cup)
Directions:
First, I preheated the oven to 350* and prepared two cookie sheets with parchment paper. Since these don't spread out when they cook, I really could have put all 20 cookies on one sheet, though.
I added the stick of butter and 1/4 c. powdered sugar to my KitchenAid and let that mix until it was nice and fluffy. Next, I added the vanilla and salt, then the pistachios and cherries:
Once that was all incorporated, I added both flours and let that mix just until it was all worked in - not long at all.
Next, I took a spoon and placed the cookies onto the baking sheets. If you want to make them into their traditional shape, you can form them into football shapes, but I made mine a little abstract:
They went into the oven for about 18 minutes. The original recipe says to check them at 16 minutes, but mine were still under-done on the bottoms so I had to wait a couple of minutes. This is how they looked when they came out (and I put them all on one cookie sheet at that point to cool):
Once they were cool (about ten minutes), I rolled them in powdered sugar that I had put into a bowl. This is how they came out:
They were really, really good!
Pistachio and Cherry Mexican Wedding Cakes
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Wednesday, January 31, 2007
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